Greedy Goblin

Friday, May 16, 2014

"To farm or not to farm" for casuals (and PLEX prices)

Provi Miner asked how could newbies and casual players benefit from my proposed mining mission farm. After thinking about it a lot, the answer was "they can't".

To understand why is it a problem, first we must first understand the term "farming". It is a no-fun, repetitive activity in a game to get game resources needed for further success. Farming makes no one "winner" and the act itself isn't enjoyable after the first times. It's an optimized activity to maximize some resource gain. It's the equivalent of hourly paid work in the simulated world of the game.

What is the problem? Multiboxing multiplies income without multiplying effort. This is my second screen while running the mining mission farm:

While doing something else, I just peek on it to see if any of the targeted ice or gas disappears, click on that window and dock up the pilot. This is a very small mission farm, since it's not my primary income. It's something my alt accounts do when I'm doing something else. My main income source is trading and while I do that, I don't run anything else, since being distracted while setting orders leads to mistypes that cost more than a day of running a mission farm. The point is that if I was making money primarily with mining mission farm, I could easily run 20+ accounts without more effort than running one. In real life you need to increase your income/hour to increase your income after a point. You can't just flip burgers 300 hours a day. Actually, if you want to run a burger-flipping "farm", you need to employ workers, giving them salary. In a game, you can run some low-paying farm 300 hours a day: run 30 accounts 10 hours a day. It's like spawning slaves out of thin air.

OK, but why does it hurt EVE Online specially? Because of PLEX. In order to run 30 accounts in WoW, you need to pay about $400 a month. In EVE you don't have to pay a dime, you just PLEX your accounts. So to farm extreme amounts of ISK in EVE, you need no more skill, skillpoints, effort or real money than paying casually, you just need enough hours at the computer to earn enough for your PLEX-es. This totally destroys the profitability of casual play. This is the elephant in the room: someone who farms for 10 hours a day should earn 10x more than the guy who does it for one hour and not 300x more!

The near-infinite ISK coming from multi-account farming, combined with its high PLEX demand is skyrocketing the PLEX prices. A casual player - unless he finds a farming activity fun by itself - has no reason to farm. He is much better off just buying PLEX for $ and converting it. If a casual would try to run mining missions with one account - even if he has a corpie giving free Orca boosts - will gain less than 1$/hour. This is true for all farming activity (ratting, security missions, FW plexes, belt mining). A casual player can't earn ISK with these to be competitive. No, I don't mean they won't be competitive with me, they won't be competitive with their casual buddy who throws the price of a coffee a day to the game. The bottom line is that if a casual asks "I have one account and 1-2 hours a day, how can I earn ISK", the honest answer is "you can't".

Why does this setup kills itself? Because the multi-account farmer is a very bad PvP target. He won't do stupid stuff. He optimized his security against gankers, both by actively evading them (warping to safe if anyone enters local) and by minimizing costs. Good luck getting 1B kills on your killboard ganking with my Ventures and tanked Rets. The ideal "casual PvP content" is the casual industrialist. He is dumb enough to be caught and valuable enough to reward a hunter. As the multi-account farmers aren't available as targets and the casual PvE players are going extinct, casual PvP dies with them.

On EN24 there is an incredibly wrong article about PLEX prices. Danny Centauri found that the higher the PLEX prices, the less PLEX are sold, and then he creates a totally nonsense explanation how can price increase decrease supply. The truth is the opposite: there are less and less casual players who'd supply PLEX on the market (buy for $), driving the price up. If this trend continues, there will only be three kinds of players:

Totally solo "omg spaceships" casuals and newbies playing for a few months who don't take part in the economy in any meaningful way

Whales spending $1000 to buy a titan

Mega-industrialists like myself making 50B+/month

Not a good perspective for the game. I see no other way to make casual PvE profitable than mercilessly breaking the multi-account farms. You see, the casual has one advantage over a farmer: his account is "free". I mean he subscribes his account because he wants to play, so any ISK he earns is his. On the other hand, the farmer account needs to earn its PLEX price to be profitable. If his activity is 20M/hour (highsec miner), he needs to farm 35 hours just to break even. Currently he can farm about 300 hours a month without using a bot if his (lack of) job allows him to be around his computer. That's 5.3B/month/account income over his PLEX. Limit him with a 3 hours a day replenishing pool, and he can only farm 90 hours and he is down to 1.1B/month/account over his PLEX. Not so stellar anymore, so the casual guy won't be two magnitudes below him.

Actually, there could be a much more elegant way: selling and buying workforce quotas. I mean an account can spend 2 hours a day with farming, but can deplete his quota creating a "looking for job" cards which can be sold on the marketplace. The buyer who consumes this card gets the time on the card, lore-wise hires him for work. This way a casual player would automatically earn ISK, depending on how much an hour of farming worth on the market. Accounts without a moderate SP limit pilot (10M would be good) would be unable to sell quotas, so new players would not be encouraged to not play and recruit-a-friend account tricks could be evaded.

PS: if you haven't heard it yesterday, 400B worth of evil has been cleansed from the Daras system:

32 comments:

Arrendis
said...

To understand why is it a problem, first we must first understand the term "farming". It is a no-fun, repetitive activity in a game to get game resources needed for further success.

First, I'm going to have to take issue with this. While this form of farming may be 'no-fun' in your estimation, 'farming' itself is simply any activity which can be continuously repeated for consistent rewards. It does not have to be no-fun.

Example:Farming kills/honor in Alterac Valley because you're the asshole hunter who knows how to exploit the Throne Room mechanics to stymie an entire raid group can be fun.

Just one example, but I'm sure other readers can provide others, if they want.

(Also, as an aside, if you don't enjoy your job? Find a new one that gives you more satisfaction.)

OK, but why does it hurt EVE Online specially? Because of PLEX. In order to run 30 accounts in WoW, you need to pay about $400 a month. In EVE you don't have to pay a dime, you just PLEX your accounts.

Yes. In order to run 30 accounts in WoW, someone needs to pay real-world money for that game-time.

In order to run 30 accounts in EVE... someone needs to pay real-world money for that game-time.

It just doesn't have to be the person using the PLEX. In effect, you are cutting people in on a share of your profits in return for paying for your account. That's it. They are hiring you to produce ISK for them.

That's not an 'elephant in the room', any more than the guy who multiboxes 5 shamans in WoW being able to run heroic instances solo and gear up for raids without anyone else's help. Which, I assure you, they still do.

Now, you're saying this is a terrible thing because it's spiking PLEX demand, and so prices. Hmm. I wonder if there might be another reason. Perhaps a window of time where PLEX were being used for something else? Like... paying for FanFest?

Well, of course, if the PLEX spike had anything to do with FanFest, then we'd expect prices to drop afterwards, and demand as well. So what have PLEX prices done in the last 2 weeks?

Well, the moving average has been dropping since 27-28 April. Has it been dropping like a rock? No, but it's kinda like gasoline prices: as long as there's a healthy demand, competition needs to be very stiff to create any real downward pressure. So if it's going to drop, it'll take a while - of course, given the way EVE activity drops off during the summer, PLEX demand may drop enough to see prices taper off as we get into June.

Has demand dropped? Hard to say yet - it does seem to have tapered off during the week just a bit, but the weekends have continued to be the days when people purchase.

Of course right now, at 01:56 on 16 May, the volume for 15 May appears to be... well, cratered. So something might be up, there.

Now, keep in mind that over the last year, PLEX inflation's been pretty standard until the middle of February. So we're going to need to wait longer to see if what we're seeing is currently a temporary artifact or not. But here's something to consider:

If the increase in PLEX prices has been driven by a commensurate increase in mining multiboxers, then we'd also expect to see an increase in ore or ice volume being traded during that same period from Feb 1 forward - and it's just not there. So there isn't any significant movement in the amount of ore/ice being mined. If there's been such a large uptick in PLEX demand from multiboxing miners... where are they? They're not actually producing anything.

So, really Gevlon, I had to put it so bluntly, but: you're wrong. Again.

I was disliking the idea if farming quotas because it goes against the free-market "fluffy" of New Eden. But I thought maybe if each account would have different quotas on high-sec and low-sec; culminating with no quotas for null-sec it could solve the problem you pointed out in the article and serve as another incentive to people to venture in low and null security systems.

Is it a decent tweak on the idea or I am missing something?

Taking the opportunity, congratulations for your blog. I love it. It was great when I started playing EVE Online over an year ago, and it continues to be great now that I am coming back.

@Arrendis: while the "I am hired to make ISK for them" makes sense, but the truth is "they are forced to hire me to make ISK for them, as they are totally uncompetitive to me".

Casual PvE players want to make ISK during their play and not paying $ to have ISK while NOT PLAYING AT ALL! PvP-ers need casual PvE players to kill. If they quit the game, or just don't play, there is no one to kill.

They are not just miner multiboxers, there are ratters, FW farmers and so on. Also, they are outcompeting casual miners, whose ore production is removed from the game.

About PLEX prices you are evading the point. It's not the PLEX price. The price is what it supposed to be, since set by free market. The problem is the constant PLEX volume decrease, which mean less people paid $ to CCP for PLEX. Which means "dropping paying player number".

but the truth is "they are forced to hire me to make ISK for them, as they are totally uncompetitive to me".

Right, but they're also not necessarily trying to compete with you. I know one guy who makes a truly ridiculous amount of money in his real job. He has very little free time. So he pays upwards of $1000 yearly to play the game on his multiple accounts... and then sells PLEXs to supply himself with ISK.

He has no intention of mining. Ever. He has no intention of PvEing. Ever.

About PLEX prices you are evading the point. It's not the PLEX price. The price is what it supposed to be, since set by free market. The problem is the constant PLEX volume decrease, which mean less people paid $ to CCP for PLEX. Which means "dropping paying player number".

Hang on.

The near-infinite ISK coming from multi-account farming, combined with its high PLEX demand is skyrocketing the PLEX prices.

So - which is driving the PLEX price up? A spike in demand because of multi-boxing, or a completely unrelated to multiboxing drop in the number of people paying for GTCs and converting them over - a drop, I will point out, that you have not demonstrated any evidence for, whatsoever.

Show me the evidence of the tightening supply, and then we can pivot to address it, however... that is more or less exactly not what you were saying in the OP. You said the price was due to high PLEX demand from multi-account farming. But over the time period when PLEX prices increased dramatically, there's no evidence of a similar upswing - or any upswing - in the volume of mining products that would indicate that.

Now, you can claim all those new multi-boxers are ratting - all of them - but that's a pretty ridiculous claim, and I think you know it.

It's far more likely that demand for PLEX got an initial kick from a sudden event that required the reactivation of dozens of accounts in a 24-48 hr period, right around the end of January/beginning of February, and that shock to the system started a price run that fed right into the FanFest demand - and now, the rush is subsiding.

Actually the point is that for many professions in Real live I can make more money per hour in front of my screen at home then if I would farm the same time (doing some real live cash to isk math) .. So I farm real live because the eve farms are annoying at least, because you have an minimum spending on plexes every month just to make your farm work .. and even if that are only 3 hours/ months .. with 3 hours a month, under the assumption that you are a big looser of ships (sub capitals) .. 2,1 bil/ month for throwing stuff away. You only need an job paying you more than 1plex/hour and then it is better to spend the time in the real world ...

The PLEX prices are driven by the multi-account farmers. But it's not a problem by itself. Exactly as you said, there are whales who put lot of money in the game. It's fine by CCP if a casual leaves and replaced by a farmalt paid by a whale.

The problem is the CONSTANT PLEX volume decrease. This proves that the leaving casuals can't be replaced by farmers+whales. I also think they theoretically cannot, since the farmer is more effective than the casual, so less farmalts are needed for the same amount of minerals than casuals.

Instead of putting time limits on farming, how about rebuilding the isk-making activities under two seperate schools of thought: One which gives quick, good income PvE content that is simulated to be like low-level small gang PvP (NPCs switch targets, use logi, maybe even warp around grid to different beacons so you have to tackle them.) The second could be passive-style income that requires strategic planning and daily upkeep for best results (similar to PI,) Have a mix of the two of these and it will give the solo, strategic player something to do while also giving an incentive to get into small, coordinated groups to make lots of iskies. Incursions once promised a way for PvE pilots to ease into fleet combat/coordination, which would at least give them the skills they need if they decide they do want to join a group that shoots things.

hmmm, just so you know where I come from: I started not long after you had completed your blog on mining last year. You are correct in that I am casual but with limits therefore my account is free but nothing else is. So I needed isk, I did not want to "farm" pve when I could pay 100% attention to the game I wanted to do "things" "play eve" "pew pew" and so forth but those cost isk.

My solution was your mining mission posts, slightly modified. First some missions suck, and some factions suck, so I needed to eliminate them (the faction was easy, don't do caldari which you suggested) the second part was harder how to avoid crappy missions. Took awhile but I figured it out. I identifed three ore, two ice, and two gas missions that I could do AFK'ish. But that still left to many missions and declining them (as you suggest for the arkornor) can sap the afk time dry. The solution to that was: pick a system in highsec that had more than 1 lvl 4 agent, I found a system (.9) with many agents this let me nearly continuesly pick the good missions. So I ran them while working every half hour or hour I would alt tab back and dock up claim rewards. So now I had an isk faucet running durring a time when I couldn't 100% pay attention. That way my "real" play time I could focus on doing things I wanted to do. Eventually I stopped one of the gas missions and settled on 1 gas, 2 ice and 3 ore missions while I worked. I don't do that now because I found relic sites in null offer nearly as much gain for far less effort. As I was able to expand my "real" time to include an extra hour.

@Gevlon"Casual PvE players want to make ISK during their play and not paying $ to have ISK while NOT PLAYING AT ALL! PvP-ers need casual PvE players to kill. If they quit the game, or just don't play, there is no one to kill."Surely if they are paying for isk, they can then use all of their time to play, rather than grind isk. What you are saying here is that someone who puts an hour a day into the game can grind less isk that someone who puts 10 hours in... Well, yeah, that's how it works. That's how it works everywhere. By the way, PI means you can plex an account with almost no effort and almost no time.

If they put in quotas, multiboxers would just run more accounts all meeting their quotas every day, just doing 10 accounts this hour, 10 accounts next hour, etc. Since they pay for themselves, the number of accounts don't matter. A casual on the other hand, when he finds a block of time, say a suddenly free Saturday he can play loads, now he's tied down by a quota.

Now you seem to think that plex prices going up would push out a causal player. I'm not sure why. It might push out a casual player who is determined to plex their game, but most causals will just pay for their sub. Plex prices going up means that when they do want to spend a few extra $ on a plex, they get MORE isk for their money.

So basically the only people who are getting pushed out are people who don't want to spend time, money or effort on becoming space-rich. Anything you do to make them happy would simply make it easier for everyone else, the bar would be pushed up and we'd be right back to this situation, because the problem is they do nothing exceptional, nothing above average, so if you make average all you need to do to plex your game, people who do something above average (so spend more time, spend more money or spend more effort) will raise the bar.

I looked at the plex history in The Forge (Jita) and took a 30 day average of plex traded volume from a year ago and today (well actually ending 2 days ago as the last 48 hours are showing oddly low data.)

30 Day average:April/May 2013: 3403.83April/May 2014: 2687.16

On only 2 days were the number of plex traded greater in 2014 than 2013. The other 28 had higher volume in 2013.

So we've essentially seen a 21% drop in plex traded volume in The Forge in the last year.

No wonder CCP are sending out surveys asking what the percentage chance is that you'll still be playing Eve in 4 months...

@Lucas: someone putting in 10x more time, should get 10x more rewards. And not 300x more.

The number of accounts matter because with quotas the farming power is decreased. If a new account gets you 5B/month with little extra effort, you will start it. If it earns you just 1B and have to pay 0.7B to upkeep it, you wont.

Saturday casuals can be handled with pool+daily replenishment. If the quota is 2hrs/day and he didn't play all week, he can play 14 hours.

High PLEX prices are indeed good for casual PvP-ers. It pushes out casual PvE players, since the rewards of their play (the ISK) is trivial compared to PLEX-ing a cup of coffee. You might don't care about them, but without them, there is no one left to kill.

The people who are pushed out are those who don't want to spend INHUMAN amount of time. Please understand that multi-account farming isn't a problem without no-life. If you mine in highsec on 10 accounts, 2 hours a day, you can barely mine enough to PLEX those accounts. If you mine 10 hours a day, you suddenly have a supercarrier every month.

Farming quotas hurt nobody besides nolifers. Casuals and PvP-ers wouldn't even notice the existence of quotas. It would hurt a 1% minority who are mostly botters anyway.

As far as I can see Gevlon never made the claim that there was a spike in demand from farmers, simply that there was strong demand from them.

If a farmer spends 1/8th of his farmed income on plexing the accounts and then plex rises by 40% he will have to spend ~1/6th of his farmed income on plex. It's still clearly profitable to farm so his plex demand remains constant.

A casual who is funding his plex via non-optimal farming might have spent 26 hours plexing his two accounts before, but has to spend 36 after the 40% rise in plex prices. If the casual doesn't have that extra time he'll probably un-sub an account. There goes his scout, his cyno, his Jita alt. The scope of things that he can do shrinks. He has less motivation to log in so he lets his main lapse. His friend logs in and doesn't have anyone to talk to so he lets his account lapse to go play DOTA with the original casual. Such is the social death spiral.

So if what we're seeing from lower PCU is that regular players are quitting then we'd expect plex prices to remain roughly constant (whales sell less plex, fewer casuals buy plex). However if the amount of farmers stays constant as the number of whales and casuals decrease then plex should go up as demand decreases more slowly than supply.

Just a thought: The economy panel at fanfest said that the volume of PLEX traded was going down, but he strongly implied that the number of PLEX bought was the same or higher than before. To me this simply means more people are using PLEX for other things (character trading, re-sculpting, second skill queues) or are holding on to them for speculation, leading to the higher prices for the PLEX that are traded. If that's the case it's nothing at all to worry about.

Also note that most casual players I would guess pay for their account without any real intention of PLEXing, so their PvE doesn't need to produce 700mil per month to be profitable, it just needs to produce more than they lose in PvP. Eventually they will reach a critical mass of ISK that they can make work for them in one of the many ways this game has.

@Gevlon"someone putting in 10x more time, should get 10x more rewards. And not 300x more."Well they are only getting 10x more. If you purely put in 10x more time, you get 10x more reward (or perhaps a marginal amount over for optimisation etc). Your 300x is coming from someone putting in 10x more time AND 30x more accounts. It's unreasonable to say that running 30 accounts and running 1 are equivalent if you play over X amount of hours per day.

"It pushes out casual PvE players, since the rewards of their play (the ISK) is trivial compared to PLEX-ing a cup of coffee."So in your mind a casual PVE player is doing it purely for the isk? What are they grinding isk for if they are a PVE player? Surely their enjoyment comes from the PVE if that's why they play. And honestly, there's no evidence that these people are being pushed out at all. Sure, EVE doesn't have a playerbase like WoW, but it's a niche game, so it won't reach that size.

"Farming quotas hurt nobody besides nolifers."Farming quotas wouldn't hurt them either. They'd simply run more accounts. As long as they can plex an account then earn income they can earn more than a casual. If a nolifer could run 30 accounts for 10 hours a day, but the quote meant they could only earn for 5 hours a day, they'd simply open 30 more accounts, play set one for 5 hours, then set 2 for 5 hours.

At the end of the day, casuals will never earn as many in game rewards in any game as a nolifer, that's just the way it works. Whatever a casual can do in a game and nolifer could do multiple times over. The only way to prevent that would be to force single account restrictions, which would be the fastest way to destroy the number of subscriptions.

Honestly though, I don't think this problem really exists at the scale you imagine it to. You'll always have people crying about plex prices, that's been going on since their introduction. The fact is, they will always go up, whether quotas are put in place or not, supply will always change so that the price doesn't drop, since players who got 700m last month for a plex wont be willing to spend the same amount of money and get 650m this month. Add onto that the fact that new ways to use plex are being added, like dual account training, and new items are being added to the nex store, where aurum is often converted from plex, and the price is destined to rise.

1) If PLEX hit 1.5b, that would be 50m/day...now, this may be an issue for a high sec miner mining veld solo at 10m/hr, but, you are seriously suggesting 50m/day is only in the reach of whales?

2) What spike in plex demand? Did you watch FF at all?Here is the graph for plex, across all regions: http://i.imgur.com/IlVnjll.png?1

I see a spike in price, but no corresponding spike in volume

3) If plex hit 1.5b, many more people would think that 1-3 hours of their RL time was worth trading in for 1.5b, and so would buy plex to sell for isk. What happens when say, 3* the amount of PLEX are available on the market, but demand for use as game time is the same?

4) Never assume that someone who plays 30 hours a week has no job, that wasnt true in 2004, and it is even less true now. Someone who plays 90 hours a week may even have a job (Shocking, I know, but not everyone works in a factory or office where they cannot have a computer logged into a game)

5) Eve lets you make money while you sleep (Especially as an EUTZ), even the most crappy trader can make 50m while sleeping every night.

6) No-lifers? see point 4. Are we really still using that? Would most non-gamers not consider someone who writes a blog about internet pixels (and its readers) no-lifers?

blame the botsminerals wouldnt be this cheap without themwith 2 miners I can easily farm 100m/day in high sec (no boost), but without bots that could be 200ishI need to mine at least 70m/day to buy PLEX's for both my miners and my Raven leveling carebear70m a day and I have no profit at all, cant buy anything to do L4 faster or to fit some Manti to run FW missions (not in the militia atm)how fun is that?cant save enough money to buy a freighter and start trading or hauling

but I dont blame the botsthey are part of the economy in every single MMOthey cant do anything in Eve, they are just mining and you can shoot them anytime :)

@Lucas: my point is exactly that someone running 30 accounts isn't putting in more skill, real money or effort than the guy running one account in the same time.

CCP clearly said that 50% of the new players quit, 10% goes "diverse play" and 40% is "leveling his Raven". If he plays 2-3 hours a day and his buddy has a much better Raven from a pair of PLEX-es, he'll likely give up.

About quotas: sure, a 10 hours farmer could have 2-3 sets of farmalts to do the SAME job. However this would mean 2-3x more income to CCP for the same damage they do to the game.

Arrendis said: "there's no evidence of a similar upswing - or any upswing - in the volume of mining products that would indicate that.

Now, you can claim all those new multi-boxers are ratting - all of them - but that's a pretty ridiculous claim, and I think you know it."

I'm just one person, but when the first dev blog re: refining changes was released, I resubbed a few of my accounts with PLEX to beginning training for ore processing 5. Then I later resubbed my entire mining fleet to get busy mining with the intent to have massive ore to compress when the expansion went live. Where is all that ore? Stored in XL arrays and stations. There is no consensus on what the premium will be for compressed ore over current refined mineral prices. So, it would appear that I have been very unproductive when that is not the case at all (you're welcome for the Geckos from mining volume). Now that the expansion has been pushed, I will unsub all the mining accounts and just leave the refiners to continue training all ores to level 5.

So, don't be so quick to discount Gevlon's theory. Like most things, there are multiple reasons and I think his is a pretty valid one...this time.

@Gevlon"my point is exactly that someone running 30 accounts isn't putting in more skill, real money or effort than the guy running one account in the same time."I disagree. While it's not linearly scaled, running 30 accounts is considerably more effort than running 1. Even with multiboxing software the efficiency per character is considerably lower because being the most efficient needs you to respond in a timely manner to changes in circumstance.

"CCP clearly said that 50% of the new players quit, 10% goes "diverse play" and 40% is "leveling his Raven". If he plays 2-3 hours a day and his buddy has a much better Raven from a pair of PLEX-es, he'll likely give up."All that statistic they released shows is that of new people that come to the game, only 10% like it and stick about. I'm OK with that. It's a niche game, it's not a mainstream run of the mill MMO. Stripping away what EVE is just to make it mainstream so the average moron will come in and play it is a dumb idea.

"sure, a 10 hours farmer could have 2-3 sets of farmalts to do the SAME job. However this would mean 2-3x more income to CCP for the same damage they do to the game."Uh no, it wouldn't. Those accounts would be plexed. Them buying more plex wouldn't mean that more people would automatically buy plex, it just means the existing plex being brought into the game would be in higher demand, thus the plex price would skyrocket. Some people may even reduce their plex purchases as they can get more isk per plex and don't need infinite isk. Sure, overall they might get some more income, but it would be nowhere close to 2-3x more.

Um... What other, recent feature was introduced to Eve that has an impact on plexes... You know, the one involving Aurum which is created by converting Plex in the Nobel Exchange?

That's right... New ship hulls. How many colletors, traders, speculators, and such jumped on this? I'm not saying thousands of Plex lost to Aurum, but this happened right around March, shortly after B-R.

This too would impact Plex prices as more were consumed on vanity items.

Mordis:I'm just one person, but when the first dev blog re: refining changes was released, I resubbed a few of my accounts with PLEX to beginning training for ore processing 5. Then I later resubbed my entire mining fleet to get busy mining with the intent to have massive ore to compress when the expansion went live.

Sure, and that accounts for part of it, but the sharp climb upward in prices starts well before those devblogs. So they can't be the root cause for the slope's climb.

A contributing factor? Sure, but not the root cause. If you look at the price curve, there's a very clear shift from normal inflationary price increases to the sudden upswing we saw from ~Feb 1 to ~May 1.

So what happened?

First, I'd speculate - and unlike Gevlon, I'm openly stating this is speculation, while Gevlon presents his completely unfounded speculation as proven fact - that the initial shocks are a result of B-R5RB.

It's my position that just needing to PLEX-activate accounts to get access to 'strategic reserves' of Titans and Supercarriers among PL, N3, SOLAR, and the CFC was enough of a one-time demand spike to deliver a shock to the system. A temporary one, but it doesn't take much to nudge a steady demand into a run on prices.

Second, we've got CCP saying the number of PLEXs bought hasn't dropped at all. Trading volume's come down a little, but the number purchased hasn't dropped. So where are those untraded PLEXs going?

As someone else has pointed out: Second Character Skill Training. That's the other thing that picks up after B-R5RB (27-28 Jan, right before the sharp uptick in prices starts): Training for Titans and Supercapitals. Sure, PL/N3 have them, but even they were in kind of a semi-complacent 'we've got 'em, we use 'em, suck it' mindset.

After B-R, suddenly the biggest collection of nerds is willing to use their big ships. Now it's an active arms race, and one of the biggest things holding alliances back in that race is pilots who can fly the bloody things. In the CFC, the 'train for dreads' became 'train for a goddamned titan'.

New accounts for SC training, new alts on existing accounts who'd need to train... all of this accounts for more demand - and PLEX bought, but not traded.

Is this the complete picture? Probably not. But there's absolutely no evidence to support Gevlon's claim that the price of PLEX has risen due to multi-account farming.

He can try to shift that around all he likes, but this is the statement I'm saying is patently wrong:

The near-infinite ISK coming from multi-account farming, combined with its high PLEX demand is skyrocketing the PLEX prices.

If multi-account farming, and its high PLEX demand were the cause of the PLEX spike, then multi-account farming itself would've needed to see a similar spike in activity. And there's no evidence of that.

Gevlon you are getting at a real problem here, but you don't quite see it.

The problem is not players earning money per se. That's good. And there's no problem at all with PLEX. PLEX are always balanced by the market. People use PLEX as savings; as money. But that is fine.

The problem is not multiboxers, either. It is anyone who PLEXes an account without creating significant content. We can look at EVE players as two types: those who pay their own money, and those who don't (i.e. who PLEX). The only reason to have the latter group is that, via the magic of the market in PLEX, they create enough content such that the "whales" buy more PLEX.

Now, it is certainly true that multiboxers are probably among the worse players in creating very little content for what they get paid. But it happens all over the place. Every time I zip up my system, then run sleeper sites with essentially no risk, I am part of this problem. Of course, I'd be an idiot to leave my system unzipped just so that someone can gank me, even though it would make him very happy.

In any case, the solution is not to stick on arbitrary play limits. If someone wants to mine veldspar for 10 hours a day, that's fine. The solution is to identify PVE that does not add significant content relative to its pay, and nerf it so that it does. The nerf can come in two ways: one is to raise the content value of the play style. The other is to reduce its pay.

Thus, for example, removing the roundly-hated discovery scanner in wspace would help to re-introduce risk into sleeper-farming. Bad from the POV of my making ISK without risk, but good for CCP.

In the case of multiboxers, it seems like the easiest way to get at them is to disallow playing more than N instances of EVE from the same computer and/or the same owning real-world person. A reasonable N might be, for example, 4.

@Arrendis: only traded PLEX affect the price. If you buy PLEX with your money to activate a second skill queue, you won't change the Jita PLEX price. So all the things you mentioned - while good news for CCP - is totally irrelevant in this discussion.

@Von Keigai: they probably run virtual machines. Also, they might multibox dreads in a sov battle.

The main problem is that the multiboxer is always more profitable and more safe than the casual player. You can increase the risk of an activity, but it will hurt the casual more. Why? Because the multiboxer only runs that one activity, so optimizes it, while the casual runs many things, so he will probably be dumb. The harder you make it, the harder the casual will fail and only the multiboxer will prevail.

Perhaps then disallowing multiboxing per machine is not helpful. So I'll just focus on multiboxing per real-world person.

they might multibox dreads in a sov battle

In other words, you are concerned about "good" multiboxing being cut off, that is contentful multiboxing.

This is certainly a risk of cutting off multiboxing. But seriously, how much content is created via, i.e., people running 10 dreads in big fights? I expect the amount created is trivial compared to the cost to the company of the people using multiboxing to farm.

In any case, if this is deemed problematic then it should be possible to programmatically allow more or less multiboxing based on hull type. I.e., pods can do nothing by way of farming, so you should be allowed to multibox as many of them as you want. Same supers and dreads. By contrast mining ships are only useful for farming and among the least contentful multiboxes, so you might make the limit on them lower.

You can increase the risk of an activity, but it will hurt the casual more.

True. So the way to fight multiboxing indirectly is going to be to make it more clicky. This has its own problems; it makes boring activities less boring but also less fun. (Loot spew, anyone?) But it does work to cut off multiboxers.

hmm... although there might be some grain of truth in it, limiting play time is ridiculous.If so, EVERY action in EVE should become limited. or else everybody would sit in jite with a trading alt.As long as people are able to make 50B a month without ever leaving the station no limitations should be implemented.when afk mining/botting is no longer "profitable" then people will adapt and bot something else, like in Deklein...maybe then there will be the exodus to null, where everybody will be ratting or grinding anoms 24/7

Gevlon, I always wondered about the huge multi-account people ever since a comment in the CSM minutes in Winter 2012. Here it is:

"UAxDEATH suggested a tangible benefit for players with multiple accounts would be discounts on subscription costs. He mentioned that at one time he had 90 accounts, but since becoming a CSM he has cut back to only 37, and asked “what would inspire me to [reactivate] those accounts?"

@Arrendis: only traded PLEX affect the price. If you buy PLEX with your money to activate a second skill queue, you won't change the Jita PLEX price. So all the things you mentioned - while good news for CCP - is totally irrelevant in this discussion.

Not so!

Let's say I buy 20 GTC each month, and put them up on the market as PLEX. This is static... until I need to activate skill training on a second character on each of 10 accounts - I'm training up cyno alts, for example.

Now, I could buy another 5 GTC, but see, I have a budget IRL. So, I just don't sell 10 PLEX - supply shrinks, and price goes up.

The picture is far more complex than you ever make it out to be, Gevlon.

CCP has implemented lots of measures to put plex out of the market.- multiple character training- convert plex to aurum- "collector's" editions- fanfest ticketsI am sure, someday I will be able to pay my rent with plex.... if I moved to Iceland...